Insects A-Z, Abridged
By Avis Lang
They crawl, cruise, flit, scurry, slither, swoop, swim, swarm, wriggle, and burrow. They gnaw, suck, sting, snap, slice, spear, and bite. They build and carry and farm. They migrate. They calculate. They are annoying, harmful, deadly, nutritious, essential, sturdy, fragile, gorgeous, intricate, hideous, hard-working, and teachable. They transport pollen, viruses, bacteria, and parasites, facilitating life, fruitfulness, disease, debilitation, and death. Their proximity endangers us. Their diminution endangers us, as it endangers birds, fish, frogs, lizards, bats. Their disappearance would mean the absence of apples, plums, peaches, cherries, berries, almonds, figs, chocolate, coffee, avocados.
These are her thoughts as she tries not to touch the summer’s welts and lumps and itches that insects have bestowed on her, as she notices waterbugs accumulating on the glue traps placed on the kitchen floor each month by the exterminator, as she tries and tries to swat the fruit flies multiplying around the rim of the covered compost bin, as she learns that certain beetles are chewing up the most ancient trees on Earth, as she reads Oliver Milman on the tricks and tribulations of insects.
But she wants more context: time frame, analogies, prognoses.
Insects have been spreading across the globe for one-tenth of Earth’s sojourn in the cosmos. Hominins—her two-legged relatives and ancestors—have been traipsing around Earth for a thousandth as long, no more than a single second of a Super Bowl game. The newest arrivals are fast erasing the longtime inhabitants’ neighborhoods. To the insects in the dwindling wildlands, the sapients are the Russians in Ukraine.
What lies ahead? Millennia after today’s two-year-olds and their progeny have melted the last glacier, caught the last lobster, savored the last raspberry, sipped the last cappuccino, and detonated the final nuclear bomb, cockroaches will still be scurrying and mosquitoes whirring, while many of their many-legged distant cousins will have long since vanished from the hot, dry, treeless, swampless, meadowless Earth that humans are designing.
She accepts these truths the way most people handle facts and reality: just barely. She keeps the glue traps on the floor and sprays Windex on the occasional centipede in the bathtub. Her actions address simply the problem at hand. She leaves it to others to deal—as they wish or can or eventually must—with the rest.
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Avis Lang
For more of Lang’s writing click here. For interviews on ACCESSORY TO WAR check out these podcast interviews: From the Biblio-Files and Full STEAM Ahead.